Turn, Turn, Turn

Original cover image from sound stage direct

"To everything there is a season."

The words are from the Bible, and the idea they express is bedrock.

And not only for the cultures descended from the Judeo-Christian tradition by way of Europe.

But who would have thought that the hit song the Byrds brought out in the midst of the heady social rebellions of 1969 would be built around a quotation from Ecclesiastes?

When I first listened to the lyrics, I was a naive young teenager. Drawn to the song for its music and poetry, I sensed its profundity too.

Now I wonder: what impelled those young musicians to express such sentiments in song? Listening to the lyrics as I looking back over the intervening forty-years, I now know the truth of the lines as told through my own experience.

The Byrds album with that song on it was the first one I ever bought. I was working in The Hub, my first real job. We sold tobacco and magazines, books and souvenirs, and we weighed out warm roasted peanuts and red-dyed pistachios from a nut machine of a type then fashionable.

At the back of the store was the music counter. Pure bliss, especially in the midst of that rich renaissance of folk music.

Before I got the album, I had to buy a turntable, because we didn't have one at home. Dad installed it in an old Marconi radio cabinet, and hooked it up to the single radio speaker. No stereo, but the album still sounded good.

How radically access to music has changed. Now the internet makes it possible to listen with joy, at a moment's notice, to any of numerous versions of any song online. So here is is, from 1969, "Turn, Turn, Turn."

By the way, The Byrds are not the only ones to be taken by this ancient line. Canadian writer Alistair Macleod has used this as a title for a Christmas story, which can be heard as a CBC radio podcast here.